About Zodaxus

Titles The Dark Liberator, The Last of the Nightbirds, The Shadow of Freedom, Slayer of the Sun, Child of the Cry, The Lord of Epic Awesomeness, The Epic Party Machine, The Greatest Dancer In The Universe and That's Just a Fact

Rationales

"The Dark Liberator, The Shadow of Freedom," These titles both reference his role as the god of darkness and the god of liberty, while subtly hinting at the destruction and violence often necessary to establish or preserve freedom.

"The Last of the Nightbirds," While Zodaxus is not and never was a Nightbird, he is the last real vestige of their civilization.

"Slayer of the Sun," A reference to his having destroyed the Kingdom of the Sun, an Empire which had reigned unquestioned for tens of thousands of years.

"Child of the Cry," A reference to his being born from the 'Freedom Cry' of the damned Nightbirds.

"The Lord of Epic Awesomeness, The Epic Party Machine, The Greatest Dancer in the Universe and That's Just a Fact," Boasts. The third is probably technically accurate, as there is likely no dancer superior to the god of dancing, but he decided to call himself that mostly to boost his own ego.

Origin Long ago, a powerful empire known as the Kingdom of the Sun was founded by a powerful mage. Hailing from a world devoid of any technology more sophisticated than chain mail, the Kingdom of the Sun traveled the stars in vessels of wood, metal and glass, relying on magic alone to protect and transport them.

As the Kingdom of the Sun expanded, conquering world after world and subjugating them under their great mage’s repressive and tyrannical rule, the Kingdom's need for magical energy grew more quickly than its ability to supply it. In order to generate the power necessary, a deal was made with a powerful arch-devil. The mage duped several of his underlings into selling their souls in exchange for being taught hell’s secret methods of extracting magical energy from the pain and suffering of mortal spirits.

(The archdevil also arranged that time would be slowed down, meaning years of torture would occur from the point of view of the mortals for every second of real time which elapsed, an excess the devil happily took for himself and allowed the Kingdom to remain ignorant of.)

With this newfound resource for generating the magical energy they needed, the Kingdom set about conquering inhabited planets to harvest the spirits of those who dwelt on them.

The first of several races the Kingdom conquered was a nocturnal avian race notable for its docile temperament and elaborate nightly mating rituals, which involved rhythmic movements many races would confuse for dancing or performance.

The Kingdom of the Sun descended upon this race, abducted them into their wooden ships, harvested their souls and placing them in a heavily enchanted flask of hellfire, intent on tormenting them for all eternity.

The Nightbirds’ time in the hellflask wore away at them. Though they were all together, they could not perceive each other but in the faintest way, and were thus lonely. At the same time, the hellfire scorched and pained their spirits for untold aeons. As this went on, the Nightbirds’ minds were slowly wiped away. They quickly forgot about the race which had abducted them, and indeed, about how they had even managed to end up where they were. They felt no anger or malevolence, only a persistent longing for the happy nights of old. As their memories decayed, their visions of the old nights became ever vaguer and more idealized, with this increasingly positive vision of their past only further fueling their desire to return to their old nights, which to them were now little more than a blurry vestige, bearing concepts of recreation, happiness, freedom and community.

Left to ferment for billions upon billions of years, these desires eventually took solid form as Zodaxus himself. Immediately upon awakening, Zodaxus freed his unwitting creators and set about destroying the Kingdom of the Sun, taking mere decades to bring liberation and happiness to a galaxy where oppression and horror had reigned since time out of mind.

Many of Zodaxus’ features are echoes of the creatures from which he was born. His propensity for floating rather than standing is not primarily an aesthetic choice, but a residual instinct from the minds of the flying creatures from which he was born. His strangely shaped head is the crude echo of a beak and a feathery crest his creators bore. His love for large group gatherings and parties rather than lonesome recreation is an echo of the communal nature of the nights whose longing birthed him. His affinity for the night is a reflection of his parent races’ desire for their nights of old.

While a few Nightbird spirits still remain in Zodaxus’ realm, even those faint echos of memory which birthed Zodaxus are now long forgotten, leaving Zodaxus himself as the only vestige of their peaceful civilization, and the only one who knows anything about it.